North By Degree

If I had to guess, I’d put the current readership of books on Ernest Shackleton at about three billion. This number will surely grow to include all members of our species once the corpus of Shackletonia has been fully translated into Chinese. Those of us who have etched out a living writing about other polar explorers smile and try not to be bitter. We make do writing articles for hard-to-pronounce journals, publishing books with tiny print runs, and giving talks at libraries and retirement homes.

Waiting for the new Shackleton biography

But there are bright moments working in the shadows of Shackleton. We, the scholars of the obscure, have a keen sense of fellowship. We know the twenty or so people out there who do the same thing we do. In polar exploration, this society of scholars includes: Russell Potter, Lisa Bloom, Kenn Harper, Peter Capelotti, and Robert Bryce. I have gotten to know these writers through their work: The Fate of Franklin, Gender on Ice, Give Me My Father’s Body, By Airship to the North Pole, and Cook and Peary. As I wrote The Coldest Crucible, I spent a good deal of time figuring out how my work connected to theirs. But for all of this, I had never met any of them.

We weren’t all cooing and nodding at each other, either. There were some good scuffles: over the Cook-Peary controversy, gender and exploration, and our different approaches to history. I’ll be featuring more tidbits from the conference over the next month or so. Maybe we can generate a good dust-up here as well.

Discussing Polar History

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Thanks for including my name on the list of ‘the fellowship.” It was indeed wonderful to meet in person all those whose books populate my groaning shelves. I look forward to “exploring” this newly-“discovered’ blog!
Tricia